Missing Microbes

Even in the harshest environments, microbes always seem to get by. They thrive everywhere from boiling-hot seafloor hydrothermal vents to high on Mt. Everest. Clumps of microbial cells have even been found clinging to the hull of the International Space Station (SN: 08/26/20).

There was no reason for microbial ecologist Noah Fierer to expect that the 204 soil samples he and colleagues had collected near Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier would be any different. 

A spoonful of typical soil could easily contain billions of microbes, and Antarctic soils from other regions host at least a few thousand per gram. 

So he assumed that all of his samples would host at least some life, even though the air around Shackleton Glacier is so cold and so arid that Fierer often left his damp laundry outside to freeze-dry.

Surprisingly, some of the coldest, driest soils didn’t seem to be inhabited by microbes at all, he and colleagues report in the June Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 

To Fierer’s knowledge, this is the first time that scientists have found soils that don’t seem to support any kind of microbial life.  READ MORE

A Few Shorts

 

Brains and Consciousness

PLANET EARTH

MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM


(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock


People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.

To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.

Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.  READ MORE

Consider These Questions and/or Statements

 

Facemasks

 

Hear What We Want to Hear

Humans depend on their senses to perceive the world, themselves and each other. Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality. During the last 20 years, neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.

A team of neuroscientists of TU Dresden headed by Prof Katharina von Kriegstein presents new findings that show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.

For their study, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses of 19 participants while they were listening to sequences of sounds. The participants were instructed to find which of the sounds in the sequence deviated from the others. Then, the participants’ expectations were manipulated so that they would expect the deviant sound in certain positions of the sequences. The neuroscientists examined the responses elicited by the deviant sounds in the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body. Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.

These results can be best interpreted in the context of predictive coding, a general theory of sensory processing that describes perception as a process of hypothesis testing. Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.

Dr Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: "Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. Decades of research in neuroscience had already shown that the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is most developed in humans and apes, scans the sensory world by testing these beliefs against the actual sensory information. We have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."

These new results open up new ways for neuroscientists studying sensory processing in humans towards the subcortical pathways. Perhaps due to the axiomatic belief that subjectivity is inherently human, and the fact that the cerebral cortex is the major point of divergence between the human and other mammal's brains, little attention has been paid before to the role that subjective beliefs could have on subcortical sensory representations.

Given the importance that predictions have on daily life, impairments on how expectations are transmitted to the subcortical pathway could have profound repercussion in cognition. Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception. The new results could provide with a unified explanation of why individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the perception of speech, and provide clinical neuroscientists with a new set of hypotheses on the origin of other neural disorders related to sensory processing.

Good Night World

 

Miscellaneous

 

Three "D" Printing

A strange shape described by mathematician Lord Kelvin in 1871 and predicted to behave unusually in a fluid has finally been fully studied in the real world thanks to 3D printing – and it seems Kelvin may have been wrong. The behaviour of the shape, called an isotropic helicoid, has been described in fluid dynamics textbooks, but it hadn’t been directly measured until now.

An isotropic helicoid must experience the same amount of drag from a fluid regardless of its orientation, like a sphere, but also rotate as it moves through the fluid. So if you dropped an isotropic helicoid into a tank of a viscous liquid, it should spin as it sinks, similar to the way a propeller turns.

Greg Voth at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his colleagues 3D printed five different shapes that should be isotropic helicoids, each a little more than a centimetre across, and dropped them into a tank of silicone oil. They were unable to detect rotation in any of them, meaning the predictions for an isotropic helicoid may be wrong.

“You’ve got to guess that somebody else has tried this in 150 years – in Kelvin’s original paper, it even sounds like he tried it,” says Voth. “I suspect that people have tried to fabricate these particles, but they were limited by defects in the fabrication so they simply didn’t publish, so the hypothesis of this behaviour has stayed with us.”

Upon delving into the hydrodynamic effects in play, the researchers calculated that there was almost certainly a link, or coupling, between the movement and rotation of their particles, meaning they fulfilled Kelvin’s criteria. But this was far too small to have any detectable effect.

“The coupling is tiny, but it still exists,” says Voth. He and his team are now working on building an isotropic helicoid where that coupling could be measurable, which would finally vindicate Lord Kelvin’s idea.  READ MORE

Turtle and Baby Seal

 

Wild Trees

Why do trees grow so much better in the wild than in your yard?
Paul Cappiello
Many years ago when I was a University of Illinois grad student, a local resident wrote to the department’s Cooperative Extension office with a question. After a bit of a preamble, the question emerged ... “How long do I need to compost fresh cricket manure before using it to fertilize my plants?”

Well, those of us self-appointed to the horticultural glitterati had a good laugh. I mean I had completed a four-year college curriculum in horticulture and a whole year of grad school. These silly people and their silly questions. ... Obviously, the letter writer had spent too much time in the sun. Of course what she meant to ask about was chicken manure (not an uncommon organic fertilizer), not cricket manure. Who on earth would ever amass enough cricket manure to have to worry about composting it before using it as fertilizer?  READ MORE

Black Bears

 

French Press Coffee

I've used a French press to brew my morning coffee for years, mostly because it's inexpensive and easy, but also because I like a rich, viscous brew. When a friend bought me a pourover kit for my birthday a few years ago, I quickly embraced the meditative ritual of repeatedly saturating coffee grounds with hot water from that elegant, gooseneck kettle; plus, I liked the cleaner, brighter cup it yielded. Alas, life got in the way again, as it so often does, and I went back to setting and forgetting it with the ole French press.

Over time, I've unriddled a few secrets to a better French press brew. I always start with whole-bean coffee, which I coarsely grind. I like using filtered water, and I always steep the grounds for exactly five minutes.

Seeking some more professional tips, I called on Bailey Manson, innovation manager at Chicago-based Intelligentsia. I did so sheepishly, knowing that Manson is a pourover-coffee lifer who's dedicated his career to unearthing impeccably extracted brews. I also knew for those very reasons that there might be no one better to ask.  READ MORE

Dogs & Cats

 

Muscles

 

Mesmerizing

 

Morning Cooking

Since the weather in East TN has been fairly humid these last few days and it seems that this humidity is going to continue, I have taken the liberty to cook my future meals in the morning rather than in the afternoon or evening when the house has become overwhelmed by the outside heat.

My present concern is spoilage or waste pertaining to the vegetables that are growing in our garden and having to throw them away because we cannot eat them fast enough...  these veges are:

• cumcumbers
• squash
• zucchini
• pepper
• tomatoes

SO...  I have decided to make as much soup as I can from those ingredients that can be easily frozen in small plastic containers should I not be able to consume it all...  to eat at a later date...  and, the good news is that I have not had to freeze anything...  YET.

Cumcumber Soup

Dice the cucumbers into a cooking pot.  Pour in 2 cans of diced potatoes.  Roughly chop up 1-2 onions and put in pot.  Add a tablespoon or two of garlic.  Add a couple of tablespoons of Greek Plain Yogurt...  and, one box of frozen spinach & artichoke dip...  add coarse pepper and salt to one's individual taste.

Cook on normal heat until all ingredients are soft then using a submersible mixer, mix up the entire contents until it is almost as smooth as a baby's ass...  let cool and put into containers that go in the frig to eat over the next couple of days.

For me, I used about 4-5 cumcumbers (actually I lost count and I'm guessing).

I have 5 dinners ready to put into the microwave and eat over the next 5 days...  and, any longer than that is questionable...  especially if one grows tired of what one is easting.

My calorie intake for each meal is 170.

My calorie goal each day is 1,600 to 1,800

If one has 3 meals plus a couple of snacks, then that's about 400 to 450 calories per meal including the two snacks as one meal.

My morning coffee and capuccinno mix accounts for 250 calories each day...  so, now I need to look at my meals being right around 400 or less...

Capital Hill

 

Every Morning...

 Click link below image to watch video...

How to Entirely Empty Your Bowels Each Morning {1 Min Routine}

I'm Fine